Technofriends

If you are new to the world of Torrents and do not completely understand the torrent terminology, this article will help you understand what the various “complex” terms actually refer to.

This article will walk you through the terminology around .torrent files, peers, leechers, seeders, sharing ratio or rating, re-seeding, swarm, trackers as collectively referred in the Torrent world.

What is a Torrent or a .torrent file?

A Torrent file is actually a small metadata file which is usually small in size and contains information about the file(s) you intend to download ( for eg, a movie, music, games, software etc). Most of the torrents are just a few kilobytes in size. The information contained in the torrent are file name(s), file size, download information etc.

What is important to understand is, that a torrent file is an enabler for you to download the actual file and the torrent itself is not the actual file ( you intended to download).

Who is a Peer?

Torrent file downloading works on a peer-to-peer architecture and this means that pieces of files are downloaded from various computers. In that sense, any other computer on the internet which is both downloading and uploading portions of a file at the same time is a peer. Peers usually do not have complete file.

What do you mean by Leechers and Seeders?

This is something which most of the newbies are not clear about. Well, understand it this way, you are not the only one who is downloading the same file. If you are the only one, the download will never complete ( because its based on the peer-to-peer model). Within this lot, there will be people ( or computers) who have an entire file and those who have portions of it.

Leechers are those peers who disconnect and stops sharing a file as soon as they’ve obtained a complete copy of the file.

Seeders on the other hand are those who continue sharing the file even after they’ve finished downloading the entire torrent and have got hold of the complete file. Seeding is a good practice in torrent world.

If there are no seeders for a file, you won’t be able to complete your download. You might reach upto 99% but not 100%.

A group of users including seeders, peers, leechers who are connected to each other for downloading or uploading a particular file are called Swarm.

What is a Share Ratio? Is it a ratio between downloads and uploads?

Share Ratio or Rating is an important term in the torrent world. It refers to the ratio of uploaded data divided by downloaded data and is applicable only for the current session. A share rating of 1.0 means you’ve uploaded the same amount of data as you’ve downloaded.

Some torrent download websites require you to have a minimum share ratio on an overall basis.

What is a tracker?

A tracker is essentially a server which stores information like how many seeders, peers, leechers exist for a particular torrent, the tracker identifies the network location of each client either uploading or downloading the P2P file associated with a torrent. It also tracks which fragment(s) of that file each client possesses, to assist in efficient data sharing between clients.

BitSnoop is targetting the niche of helping users download clean and fast torrents. You can read about it in my earlier coverage at BitSnoop Helps You Download Clean and Fast Torrents.

What are Torrent Clients?

A torrent client ( or BitTorrent client, as they are popularly known) is a software application which implements the BitTorrent protocol. A BitTorrent client is capable of requesting, downloading and transmitting file over a network,making use of the BitTorrent protocol. BitTorrent clients connect to a tracker when attempting to download or share torrent files. The tracker as mentioned earlier, notifies the client of the P2P file ( portion of file) location. The client then establishes a connection with the remote compter and downloads the particular portion of the file. The client also keeps sharing the file ( if it is not configured to block sharing).

I personally like uTorrent as a BitTorrent client, but other good clients are Azureus ( now known as Vuze)  and BitComet.

How does this entire Torrent stuff work?

Well, now that you know what a peer, leecher and seeder refer to and what is a share ratio and what a tracker is, you must be thinking, how this all comes together.

In order to start with the download, as an end user, you must first connect to a tracker. I usually find my torrents from Torrentz.com.When you have downloaded the .torrent file, you must open the torrent file using the BitTorrent client. The BitTorrent client ten connects to the tracker which is specified in the .torrent file, from which it gets list of peers who are currently transferring pieces of the file(s) which are specified in the torrent. The client then connects to the peers to obtain the portions of files ( or pieces) and complete the download. However, as i mentioned earlier, the role of seeders is very important, else, Peers, will not be able to download the complete file.

If you are worried about your Privacy when downloading Torrents, you can try using TorrentPrivacy. For more information about how TorrentPrivacy works, please read my earlier coverage titled Protect Your Privacy While Downloading Torrents With TorrentPrivacy

Also Read: TXTor lets you download torrents as txt files

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